“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” — Benjamin Franklin

I can count on one hand the best presentations I have ever experienced, the most recent being my university dynamics lecturer bringing out his electric guitar at the end of term to demonstrate sound waves; a pharmaceutical CEO giving an impassioned after-dinner oration about how his love of music influenced his business decisions; and last but not least, my award-winning attempt at explaining quantum entanglement using a marble run and a cardboard box (I won a bottle of wine).

It’s perhaps equally easy to recall all the worst presentations I’ve experienced as well—for example, too many PowerPoint presentations crammed full of more bullet points than a shooting target; infinitesimally small text that only Superman’s telescopic vision could handle; presenters intent on slowly reading every word that they’ve squeezed onto a screen and thoroughly missing the point of a presentation: that of succinctly communicating interesting ideas to an audience.

Introducing the Ultimate Technical Presentation Environment with Live Interactivity

We are delighted to announce that Wolfram’s latest comprehensive notebook technology extension is here. Released with Version 11.3 of Wolfram desktop products, Wolfram Presenter Tools is the world’s first fully computational presentation environment, seamlessly extending the notebook workflow for easy creation and delivery of dynamic presentations and slide shows, automatically scaled to fit any screen size. Our unique presentation features include rapid stylesheet updating and automatic slide breaking based on cell style.

This June 23rd it’ll be 30 years since we released Version 1.0, and I’m very proud of the fact that we’ve now been able to maintain an accelerating rate of innovation and development for no less than three decades. Critical to this, of course, has been the fact that we use the Wolfram Language to develop the Wolfram Language—and indeed most of the things that we can now add in Version 11.3 are only possible because we’re making use of the huge stack of technology that we’ve been systematically building for more than 30 years.

We’ve always got a large pipeline of R&D underway, and our strategy for .1 versions is to use them to release everything that’s ready at a particular moment in time. Sometimes what’s in a .1 version may not completely fill out a new area, and some of the functions may be tagged as “experimental”. But our goal with .1 versions is to be able to deliver the latest fruits of our R&D efforts on as timely a basis as possible. Integer (.0) versions aim to be more systematic, and to provide full coverage of new areas, rounding out what has been delivered incrementally in .1 versions.

In addition to all the new functionality in 11.3, there’s a new element to our process. Starting a couple of months ago, we began livestreaming internal design review meetings that I held as we brought Version 11.3 to completion. So for those interested in “how the sausage is made”, there are now almost 122 hours of recorded meetings, from which you can find out exactly how some of the things you can now see released in Version 11.3 were originally invented. And in this post, I’m going to be linking to specific recorded livestreams relevant to features I’m discussing.

What’s New?

OK, so what’s new in Version 11.3? Well, a lot of things. And, by the way, Version 11.3 is available today on both desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux) and the Wolfram Cloud. (And yes, it takes extremely nontrivial software engineering, management and quality assurance to achieve simultaneous releases of this kind.)

Our Latest R&D Output

It was only this spring that we released Version 11.1. But after the summer we’re now ready for another impressive release—with all kinds of additions and enhancements, including 100+ entirely new functions:

Now you can evaluate Wolfram Language code, call deployed APIs and execute standalone scripts directly from your favorite command-line interface. WolframScript works like any other command-line utility, enabling flexible connections between the Wolfram System and other programs and I/O.

A Minor Release That’s Not Minor

I’m pleased to announce the release today of Version 11.1 of the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica). As of now, Version 11.1 is what’s running in the Wolfram Cloud—and desktop versions are available for immediate download for Mac, Windows and Linux.

What’s new in Version 11.1? Well, actually a remarkable amount. Here’s a summary:

Jeremy Sykes: To celebrate the release of Hands-on Start to Wolfram Mathematica and Programming with the Wolfram Language (HOS2), now in its second edition, I sat down with the authors. Working with Cliff, Kelvin and Michael as the book’s production manager has been an easy and engaging process. I’m thrilled to see the second edition in print, particularly now in its smaller, more conveniently sized format.

Could you fit the code for a fully functional game of Pong into a single tweet? One that gives you more points the more you take your chances in letting the “ball” escape? Philip Maymin did, and took first prize with that submission in the One-Liner Competition held at this year’s Wolfram Technology Conference.

Participants in the competition submit 128 or fewer tweetable characters of Wolfram Language code to perform the most impressive computation they can dream up. We had a bumper crop of entries this year that showed the surprising power of the Wolfram Language. You might think that after decades of experience creating and developing with the Wolfram Language, we at Wolfram Research would have seen and thought of it all. But every year our conference attendees surprise us. Read on to see the amazing effects you can achieve with a tweet of Wolfram Language code.

I’m thrilled today to announce the release of a major new version of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language: Version 11, available immediately for both desktop and cloud. Hundreds of us have been energetically working on building this for the past two years—and in fact I’ve personally put several thousand hours into it. I’m very excited about what’s in it; it’s a major step forward, with a lot of both breadth and depth—and with remarkably central relevance to many of today’s most prominent technology areas.

It’s been more than 28 years since Version 1 came out—and nearly 30 years since I started its development. And all that time I’ve been continuing to pursue a bold vision—and to build a taller and taller stack of technology. With most software, after a few years and a few versions, not a lot of important new stuff ever gets added. But with Mathematica and the Wolfram Language it’s been a completely different story: for three decades we’ve been taking major steps forward at every version, progressively conquering vast numbers of new areas.